Nineteenth Amendment Quotes

Black women had been more than willing to contribute those "clear powers of observation and judgement" towards the creation of a multi-racial movement for women's political rights. But at every turn, they were betrayed, spurned and rejected by the leaders of the lily-white woman suffrage movement. For suffragists and clubwomen alike, Black women were simply expendable entities when it came time to woo Southern support with a white complexion. As for the woman suffrage campaign, it appears that all those concessions to Southern women made very little difference in the end. When the votes on the Nineteenth Amendment were tallied, the Southern states were still lined up in the opposition camp--and, in fact, almost managed to defeat the amendment.

1917, when Frances was thirty-seven and Mitchel faced reelection, women in New York first won the right to vote in state elections. In 1920 women won the right to vote in national elections when the nineteenth amendment to the Constitution was ratified.11

and over the centuries, we clawed out access to the ballot for people of color through the Fifteenth Amendment, women in the Nineteenth Amendment, and young voters in the Twenty-Sixth Amendment. But each of those amendments contained a loophole for suppression: leaving implementation to the states, particularly the ones most hostile to inclusion.

Any lasting solutions come solely from the U.S. Constitution, the highest legal bar imaginable; and over the centuries, we clawed out access to the ballot for people of color through the Fifteenth Amendment, women in the Nineteenth Amendment, and young voters in the Twenty-Sixth Amendment. But each of those amendments contained a loophole for suppression: leaving implementation to the states, particularly the ones most hostile to inclusion.

During the 25 elections between 1850 and 1898 . . . turnover averaged 50.2 percent. On average, more than half the House during any given session in the second half of the nineteenth century was made up of first term members.

The history of black workers in the United States illustrates the point. As already noted, from the late nineteenth-century on through the middle of the twentieth century, the labor force participation rate of American blacks was slightly higher than that of American whites. In other words, blacks were just as employable at the wages they received as whites were at their very different wages. The minimum wage law changed that. Before federal minimum wage laws were instituted in the 1930s, the black unemployment rate was slightly lower than the white unemployment rate in 1930. But then followed the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931, the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938—all of which imposed government-mandated minimum wages, either on a particular sector or more broadly. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which promoted unionization, also tended to price black workers out of jobs, in addition to union rules that kept blacks from jobs by barring them from union membership. The National Industrial Recovery Act raised wage rates in the Southern textile industry by 70 percent in just five months and its impact nationwide was estimated to have cost blacks half a million jobs. While this Act was later declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 was upheld by the High Court and became the major force establishing a national minimum wage. As already noted, the inflation of the 1940s largely nullified the effect of the Fair Labor Standards Act, until it was amended in 1950 to raise minimum wages to a level that would have some actual effect on current wages. By 1954, black unemployment rates were double those of whites and have continued to be at that level or higher. Those particularly hard hit by the resulting unemployment have been black teenage males. Even though 1949—the year before a series of minimum wage escalations began—was a recession year, black teenage male unemployment that year was lower than it was to be at any time during the later boom years of the 1960s. The wide gap between the unemployment rates of black and white teenagers dates from the escalation of the minimum wage and the spread of its coverage in the 1950s. The usual explanations of high unemployment among black teenagers—inexperience, less education, lack of skills, racism—cannot explain their rising unemployment, since all these things were worse during the earlier period when black teenage unemployment was much lower. Taking the more normal year of 1948 as a basis for comparison, black male teenage unemployment then was less than half of what it would be at any time during the decade of the 1960s and less than one-third of what it would be in the 1970s. Unemployment among 16 and 17-year-old black males was no higher than among white males of the same age in 1948. It was only after a series of minimum wage escalations began that black male teenage unemployment not only skyrocketed but became more than double the unemployment rates among white male teenagers. In the early twenty-first century, the unemployment rate for black teenagers exceeded 30 percent. After the American economy turned down in the wake of the housing and financial crises, unemployment among black teenagers reached 40 percent.

I’m not a Black Nationalist, because I believe the Reconstruction and Nineteenth Amendments could redeem this whole bigoted and misogynist enterprise. But white people won’t let them. It really is that simple. I say the fifteenth Amendment must mean that the votes of Black people cannot be suppressed by voter ID laws, and white people tell me no. I say that Black political power cannot be gerrymandered away by racist white legislatures, and white people tell me no. I say that the Fourteenth Amendment’s grant of equal protection of laws must protect me from racial harassment by the cops, and entitles me to equal pay for my talents, and promises me that my peaceful protest will be treated with the same permissiveness the cops accord to a mob of white insurrectionists storming the nation’s Capitol, and white people tell me no, no, no. These amendments are a tonic white people refuse to drink. They can cure the Constitution of its addiction to white male supremacy, if white people would just take the medicine.

in my campaign launch speech on Roosevelt Island, I took the opportunity to talk about my mother. When I thought about the sweep of history, I thought about her. Her birthday had just passed a few days earlier. She was born on June 4, 1919—the exact same day that Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, finally granting women the right to vote. “I really wish my mother could be here tonight,” I told the crowd in Brooklyn. I had practiced this part several times, and each time, I teared up. “I wish she could see what a wonderful mother Chelsea has become, and could meet our beautiful granddaughter, Charlotte.” I swallowed hard. “And, of course, I wish she could see her daughter become the Democratic Party’s nominee for President of the United States.

With the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, “race, color, or previous condition of servitude” could no longer be used to deny citizens the right to vote (though, in practice, they often were).7 The direct election of senators was established by the Seventeenth Amendment in 1912.8 Finally, the Nineteenth Amendment, passed in 1920, decreed that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged on account of sex.

Perhaps not coincidentally, many of the Western territories in which women staked out land were places in which woman suffrage would precede passage of the nineteenth amendment.

I died when I was little more than two years old, on June 13, 1919, there in the Signal Corps lofts at Camp Vail, New Jersey. One week after Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment, which would eventually recognize the right of women to vote. Pigeons do not vote, but as a female being I felt a degree of investment in the fortunes of other females.

George Mason’s Lockean natural rights guarantee continued to be popular. Versions of it specifying its various expansive protections of the rights to pursue happiness and acquire property had been adopted by seven states by 1818.72 Therefore, by the early nineteenth century state constitutional drafters had learned to do two things: protect rights broadly through fairly open-ended constitutional language, and exempt rights out of the powers that the people extend to state governments.

This book is about women so angry at slavery and lynching that they risked their lives and reputations and pioneered new forms of public expression for women, including speeches in front of mixed-gender and mixed-race audiences; about women so furious at their lack of a franchise that they walked 150 miles from New York City to Albany to petition for the vote, went on hunger strikes, and picketed outside the White House. Women so angry that they stayed angry for the decades—their lifetimes—it took to get the right to vote, first via the Nineteenth Amendment and then the Voting Rights Act, their rage leading them to acts of civil disobedience—marches and sit-ins and voting when it was not legal to do so—for which they would be jailed, beaten. Women who took conversations that had historically been whispered and chose instead to broadcast them via open-air rallies and in the pages of newspapers and in lawsuits and in front of political conventions and judiciary committees.

You’re not safe to go back there,” he said. “I’m going,” I returned. “We’ll see.” Jeez, there was just no shaking this guy. “You do know that there’s this little thing called the Nineteenth Amendment giving women the right to vote?” I asked. “I heard of that,” he said and there was a smile in his voice. “And there’s this whole movement called fem… in… is…im.” I said it slowly, like he was a dim child. “Where women started working, demanding equal pay for equal work, raising their voices on issues of the day, taking back the night, stuff like that.” He rolled into me, which made me roll onto my back. “Sounds familiar.” “Do you have an encyclopedia? Maybe we can look it up. If the words are too big for you to read, I’l read it out loud and explain as I go along.” He got up on his elbow. “Only if you do it naked.” I slapped his shoulder.

Most people know the Nineteenth Amendment granting women’s suffrage was passed in 1919 and ratified by the states the following year. What few people know is there was a forty-year struggle over that amendment, with Republicans pushing for it and Democrats opposing it, until the Republicans finally had the votes to get it through. Republicans proposed women’s suffrage as early as 1878, but it was voted down by a Democrat-controlled Congress. Republicans re-introduced the issue each year, but for many years the Democrats tied it up in committees. It only got to the floor in 1887 when the Democrats again defeated it.

The Tonnage Act, now called the Bank of England Act, was amended repeatedly over the next couple of centuries. The result was classic British fraud: the Bank of England came to be seen as a government institution, even though it was owned by private individuals. The board, however, was appointed by the government. In 1935, the British would impose the same model on India when the Reserve Bank of India was created. What had started as a Swedish necessity in 1678 and was a British one in 1694, became a global fad over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Country after country set up central banks,

Within the coming decade alone, three signal amendments would be added to the Constitution: the Sixteenth, giving the national government the power to levy a progressive income tax, without which many of the New Deal’s social programs might not have been possible; the Seventeenth, providing for the popular election of U.S. senators; and the Nineteenth, finally granting American women the right to vote.

But progress—slow and winding—has been made over the decades toward America fulfilling its promise. The hard-fought passage of the Thirteenth through Fifteenth, as well as the Nineteenth, Amendments to the Constitution, civil rights legislation, the legalization of same-sex marriage—all demonstrate that this country has an ability to recognize and correct mistakes and introduce political reform and policy change. This is another built-in advantage of democracies. Certainly more must be done, but as Winston Churchill put it, “No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried.

In the late nineteenth century, alcohol and drinkers were the targets in the United States. It was asserted that the drug “takes the kind, loving husband and father, smothers every spark of love in his bosom, and transforms him into a heartless wretch, and makes him steal the shoes from his starving babe’s feet to find the price for a glass of liquor. It takes your sweet innocent daughter, robs her of her virtue and transforms her into a brazen, wanton harlot.”2 These negative narratives became so plentiful that Congress was persuaded to amend the Constitution, banning the manufacture, sale, or transportation of alcoholic beverages.

US Navy into which young men enlisted during the late 1930s and early 1940s was decidedly white. This had not always been the case. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, African Americans served in a largely integrated American Navy and made up about 25 percent of its enlisted strength. Some thirty thousand African Americans manned Union vessels during the Civil War, with little discrimination as to duties. After segregation was legalized in 1896, African American enlistments declined and black men were increasingly relegated to the galley or engine room. After World War I, African American enlisted personnel declined further as the Navy recruited Filipino stewards for mess duties. By June 1940, African Americans accounted for only 2.3 percent of the Navy’s 170,000 total manpower. The fleet had mostly converted from coal to oil, and the vast majority of African Americans performed mess duties. Black reenlistments in technical specialties were never barred, however, and a few African American gunner’s mates, torpedo men, and machinist mates continued to serve. Amendments to the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 guaranteed the right to enlist regardless of race or color, but in practice, “separate but equal” prejudices consigned most blacks to the Steward’s Branch. Its personnel held ratings up to chief petty officer, but members wore different uniforms and insignia, and even chief stewards never exercised command over rated grades outside the Steward’s Branch. The only measure of equality came when, just as with everyone else aboard ship, African American and Filipino stewards were assigned battle stations. Only then could they stand shoulder to shoulder with their white brothers in arms.13

Perhaps not coincidentally, many of the Western territories in which women staked out land were places in which woman suffrage would precede passage of the nineteenth amendment. Women could vote in Wyoming, Utah, Washington, Montana, Colorado, Idaho, California, Arizona, Kansas, Oregon, Nevada, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Michigan, and Alaska before 1920, while women in the more urban, established Eastern states (save for New York) had to wait for the Constitution to change.

It was a far cry from what happened when women first marched on Washington, the day before Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration in 1913. Thousands of suffragettes trooped down Pennsylvania Avenue demanding the right to vote, including Alice Paul, Helen Keller, and Nellie Bly. Men lined the way, gawking, jeering, and eventually turning into an angry mob. The police did nothing, and scores of marchers were injured. The violence drew the nation’s attention to the suffragette cause. The superintendent of police was fired. Congress held hearings. And seven years later, the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, granting women the right to vote.

In fact, after examining the historical documents and records surrounding the framing of the Second Amendment, if any individual or group still claims that the right to keep and bear arms is not an individual right, then that individual or group is just as likely - to use the words of nineteenth-century military chaplain William Biederwolf - to "look all over the sky at high noon on a cloudless day and not see the sun.

Today the equal protection guarantee extends to women, but if you ask the question “Back in 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment became part of the Constitution, did the people at that time envision that women would be citizens equal in stature to men?” The answer, surely no. But as I see the equality idea—it was there from the beginning and was realized by society over time. So I would say this: It’s true that in 1868 women were a long way from having the vote. But then the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920, and women gained the vote. We had the civil rights movement of the 1960s aimed at making the equality guarantee real for race—as it should have been from the beginning. Those developments inform my view of what the Equal Protection Clause means today.

Helping other did wonders for volunteer's self-esteem. Why, if women showed such dedication and courage in this crisis, they could do anything - even vote in election!. Opponents argued that "the ladies" should not have the right to vote because they were too unstable, too emotional, too "fragile" to make important decisions without male guidance. Women's activities during the pandemic helped change minds. Thus, it was no accident that, in August 1920, most states approved the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitutions, which granted women to right to vote." ~ Very, Very, Very Dreadful Albert Marrin